Uit de leeszaal (43)

‘When I was younger I used to worry so much about being alone – of being unlovable or incapable of love. As the years went on, my worries changed. I worried that I had become incapable of having a relationship , of offering intimacy. I felt as though the world lived inside a warm house at night and I was outside, and I couldn’t be seen – because I was out there in the night. But now I am inside that house and it feels just the same.
Being alone here now, all of my old fears are erupting – the fears I thought I had buried forever by getting married: fear of loneliness; fear that being in and out of love too many times itself makes you harder to love; fear that I would never experience real love; fear that someone would fall in love with me, get extremely close, learn everything about me and then pull the plug; fear that love is only important up until a certain point after which everything is negotiable.
For so many years I lived a life of solitude and I thought life was fine. But I knew that unless I explored intimacy and shared intimacy with someone else then life would never progress beyond a certain point. I remember thinking that unless I knew what was going inside of someone else’s head other than my own I was going to explode.’
[Douglas Coupland, Life after God, p. 142-143.]